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Image of the Month - November 2017

Telescope:

Liverpool Telescope

Observer:

Copernicus1 - Glebe School

This month's image comes courtesy of our 'Share Your Images' forum in a post by Copernicus1. This is a manipulated 3-colour image of the galaxy Messier 82 otherwise known as the Cigar Galaxy. This is an incredibly interesting galaxy which is under-going an extreme burst of star formation in it's core. This enormous star burst leads to many of the young stars going supernova, and gas (seen in red on the image) and dust (the brown streams) being thrown out the core of the galaxy. The amount of stars forming help the galaxy to outshine the Milky Way by about 5 times, but when looking into the centre of the system that rises to 100 times! There are around 200 young clusters of stars just in the core of the galaxy which have a mass around 200,000 times that of the Sun!

Download the files below and have a go at creating this image for yourself using LT Image: